OE:  I wouldn't necessarily say that the works are quick or easy to see. Of course, if you enter the museum with a fixed, preconceived idea of what you will experience, then you can run through the exhibition in no time. But to my mind, seeing is not enough. Take your time is more about engaging physically with the works, and the body is really slow — it takes time for different senses to be activated.

OE:  Actually, monofrequency light is used in traffic tunnels because it sharpens the drivers' ability to distinguish forms. You see everything in a duotone of black and yellow, and this makes you more alert to your surroundings — it's a safety measure. I don't think there's a "best condition" for the work to be viewed in. The lights can be adapted to the site in which they're installed. At MoMA, we experimented with it, installing the light both in the long contained corridor leading into the exhibition itself as well as in the escalator area. That latter space gives the work a different dimension; it allows the light to spill into the rest of the museum — visitors can see it before actually entering the third floor. And by spreading into the museum, the light gives some importance to the entrance sequence as well. The question is, of course: when does our experience of the show begin? It could even be before we enter the museum.

OE:  Usually time is considered the fourth dimension — time is embodied in all my works, I'd say — it's not specific to the Mirror doors. But, of course, those works do try to challenge our understanding of dimensionality.

OE:  They're models of ideas, tests, experiments — but, then again, so are my so-called "final" works. I don't really find it necessary or productive to make a distinction between the two, except when it comes to scale. The big Take your time mirror at P.S.1 is a model, for instance, that sets up a spatial situation with different dimensions and coordinates from what we usually expect of that space.

OE:  Water has many connotations — political, environmental, ethical, aesthetic, and so on. It's interesting to work with a material that's entangled in so many discourses; it carries us away from a definition of water as simply H2O. That being said, I don't consider myself as an artist working primarily with natural materials, as some people have suggested. To me, it's not the materials themselves that are interesting in the end, but what they can tell us about how we perceive the world.

OE:  It seemed a great opportunity, and I've long wanted to work with the urban tissue of New York. I've been fascinated by the city ever since I lived here for some time in 1991, particularly the negative spaces between the buildings in Manhattan and how they change our way of orienting ourselves in the city. I wanted to look at the waterfront as a kind of negative space as well — it's a place that offers so much potential, but it's often neglected because people tend to focus on the interior of Manhattan.

OE:  I've been thinking about various projects for New York for a very long time, and my discussions with the Public Art Fund go far back. But it was around February 2006 that the project took shape, and everyone involved has been working incredibly hard on it ever since.

OE:  It's one project comprising a sequence of works. To me, the time it takes for people to move from one Waterfall to the next is an integral part of the installation.

OE:  There are so many ways of accessing the Waterfalls — you can walk, bike, go by boat — that there's really no one best vantage point. There will be some light after sunset, but it's not going to function as a spectacular element. I don't want to add a representational filter, if we can call it that. Light is used only to emphasize the volume of the water.

OE:  The Public Art Fund consulted with numerous environmental experts to make sure that the falling water won't have a negative impact on the river or animal life. In this way, the project has brought together people from more fields than any of my works ever have before.

OE:  I'd like people to be open to their own experience, both individual and collective, without arriving with any assumed understanding of what will happen. This is exactly where engagement becomes crucial — it can make everyone experience something slightly different from everyone else.